Interesting!
Do you believe:
- That time must have duration for the perspective, for identity to be realized?
- That identity in any given moment (with out time duration ) could be entirely non-ascertainable?
- Therefore time duration [ passing of time ] is needed to know (experience) yourself to be you?
"Duration" [length or amount of continuance], and whatever organized framework it was embedded in or possessed overall itself, is what time would still have left minus the flow. There's a boggling amount of Planck-time units that the smallest interval of human awareness could be further divided into in terms of what it supervenes over. But events at that scale have no cognitive / perceptual / intellectual capacity and interest about anything. Due to "understanding" (including the understanding of one object being distinct from another; knowledge of individuality) being a process or series of steps that has to stretch beyond what the most elemental temporal division is. Even if it was of the experience-less kind of understanding which a robot computer would have (i.e., the latter's procedures of "dark awareness" or outputting of invisible evidence / conclusions about _whatever_; zombie consciousness that is minus the phenomenal showings of images, sounds, skin sensations, etc).
Paul Davies: "Peter Lynds's reasonable and widely accepted assertion that the flow of time is an illusion (25 October, p 33) does not imply that time itself is an illusion. It is perfectly meaningful to state that two events may be separated by a certain duration, while denying that time mysteriously flows from one event to the other. Crick compares our perception of time to that of space. Quite right. Space does not flow either, but it's still 'there'." --New Scientist, 6 December 2003, Sec. Letters
Hermann Weyl: "The objective world simply IS, it does not HAPPEN. Only to the gaze of my consciousness, crawling upward along the life line [worldline] of my body, does a certain section of this world come to life as a fleeting image in space which continuously changes in time." --Philosophy of Mathematics and Natural Science
Robert Geroch: "There is no dynamics within space-time itself: nothing ever moves therein; nothing happens; nothing changes. [...] In particular, one does not think of particles as 'moving through' space-time, or as 'following along' their world-lines. Rather, particles are just 'in' space-time, once and for all, and the world-line represents, all at once the complete life history of the particle." --General Relativity from A to B
Christof Koch: "How does this stream of impressions come to be? Is our perception really as continuous as it seems, or is it divided into discrete time parcels, similar to frames in a movie? These questions are among the most interesting being investigated by psychologists and neuroscientists. The answers will satisfy more than our curiosity --they will tell us if our experience of reality is accurate or a fiction and if my fiction is different from yours. [...] [Talis] Bachmann believes that consciousness for any one sensation takes time, comparable to the development of a photograph. Any conscious percept --say, the color red-- does not instantly appear; we become aware of it gradually. A large body of experimental work seems to support this hypothesis. [...] The important point is that we experience events that occur more or less at the same moment as synchronous. And events that reach us sequentially are perceived in that order. Depending on the study, the duration of such snapshots is between 20 and 200 milliseconds. We do not know yet whether this discrepancy reflects the crudeness of our instruments or some fundamental quality of neurons. Still, such discrete perceptual snapshots may explain the common observation that time sometimes seems to pass more slowly or quickly." --The Movie in Your Head; SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN; 2005
This comes back to a question I posed to the forum a few years ago: Who are you when you are unconscious (no time passage)?
Whatever one is supposed to be independent of conscious and intellectual representations -- or how one supposedly exists ontologically as opposed to epistemologically [as if one could ever truly escape the latter]. In the above brand of scientific realism, apparently that would be the whole of one's spacetime "worm" [the body's worldline extended from embryonic development to death], rather than any specious "current" slice from that being experienced while conscious or illusorily seeming to flow from change to change in it. However, all the regions in the worm that were aware would be perpetually "turned-on" in that way (so to speak). Again, this slice of you wouldn't know that yesterday's slice of you was still existant and still consciously "lit-up" because the latter's sensory input and working memory [and the cognition dependent upon it] is not part of "this slice".
